Measures moving through Congress to encourage new reactors are receiving broad bipartisan support, as lawmakers embrace a once-contentious technology.
The House this week overwhelmingly passed legislation meant to speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear power plants, the latest sign that a once-contentious source of energy is now attracting broad political support in Washington.
The 365-to-36 vote on Wednesday reflected the bipartisan nature of the bill, known as the Atomic Energy Advancement Act. It received backing from Democrats who support nuclear power because it does not emit greenhouse gases and can generate electricity 24 hours a day to supplement solar and wind power. It also received support from Republicans who have downplayed the risks of climate change but who say that nuclear power could bolster the nation’s economy and energy security.
“It’s been fascinating to see how bipartisan advanced nuclear power has become,” said Joshua Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “This is not an issue where there’s some big partisan or ideological divide.”
It is just too reliable, can be put almost anywhere, and takes up so little space. It is routine for a reactor to hit over 50 years of continuous operation only hydro can brag about that and it is very limited in where it can go.
Nuclear power is part of the solution not even the majority as far as I am concerned but it is there. The numbers I have seen are 23% of global emissions comes from hydro-carbon power plants and 24% from industrial which also includes the local power they generate. With nuclear we could eliminate a lot of the problem in only a few years.
‘Few years’ – there has been no Nuclear Power Plant in the last 50 years, which has been built faster than 15 years – except for Chinese ones.
Also ‘can be put almost everywhere’ is quiet a stretch. For example french has build a lot of NPPs at rivers, which now shut down in Summer due to drought.
If you take things seriously it gets done. If you spend thirty years fucking around in courts and with permits it takes thirty years. About 60% of my clients are various governments ranging from federal on every continent to towns that have under a 100 people. A government project takes as long as people want it to take.
Just to give you one tiny example. I had a project in Dubai for what should have been a pretty simple system. We had this project manager between us and the government and I legit think he has an anxiety disorder plus he is someone’s nephew and not at all qualified. The result was never ending paperwork. Between me and my coworker we ended up ranking in about 80 or so hours just filling out paperwork for what should have been a system so simple that our permit generation system could have handled it. This is really not an exaggeration. It should have been about fifteen minutes entering values into a python script and ended up being 80 hours.
Want to know how we finished the project? The CEO of the company got furious and sent an email saying that there will be no more paperwork and they could take it as it stood or not.
All it takes is someone running things to say “no” and suddenly problems that are unsolvable become trivial. This event happens about once every two months or so at the corporation I work at.
It sucks that it is like this but honestly no one excepts government to work.
Pretty simple to build a NPP in a dictatorship.
Maybe. As I mentioned with Dubai they can also pretty bad at infrastructure.
Too me at least it is accountability. When the government/people expect things to get done they tend to get done. When everyone accepts corruption and foot dragging you get both.